The brewery industry is perhaps one of the oldest continuous industries with which man has been involved. While most modern brewery companies produce products that are quite comparable in overall appearance and taste, different breweries do vary the ratios of ingredients to achieve variations in flavor. One of the flavor ingredients varied by breweries is hops which is utilized in virtually all brewing processes for beer and ale products. The hops contain both essential oils that give aroma to the product and hop acids that provide the bitterness desireable in the product. Accordingly, variation in the amount of the essential oils and beer acids placed in the beer or ale affects the flavor; this mandates careful control of the quality and quantity of hops used in the brewing process.
Hops, however, is a seasonal crop having a very limited time of harvest which necessitates preservation of hops for 12 months or more in order to be used year round. Preservation of hops, therefore, is a problem that has long confronted the brewing industry. During the storage process it is imperative to protect the hops from heat and exposure to air since the heat can cause vaporization of the essential oils from the hops and air or a combination of air and heat can result in oxidation of the hops which causes an "off" flavor. In any event, unless the brewer is able to maintain consistency in the quality of hops, the beer or ale produced may vary in taste from batch to batch as a result of the variation in the amount of essential oils and hop acids present in the product. Accordingly, it has been necessary to find ways of storing hops which maintain the levels of essential oils and hop acids at fairly constant levels.
Such present methods of preservation of the hops include refrigerating the hops, sealing the hops in a vacuum, pelletizing the hops and sealing them in a vacuum, and extracting the essential oils and acids for storage; these techniques, however, have several drawbacks. For example, both refrigerating fresh hops and vacuum sealing of fresh hops require large storage spaces and are accordingly expensive to employ. In addition, these techniques consume large amounts of energy either in the packaging process or in the maintenance of the fresh hops at refrigerated temperatures. While pelletizing and sealing the hops in a vacuum reduces the storage space, it also is a fairly expensive process to carry out. Finally, extraction of the essential oils and beer acids has the drawback of altering the flavor of beer which uses the extracted product as one of its ingredients.
In addition to hops, common beer and ale recipes call for the inclusion of dextrose (glucose) in the form of corn or rice sugar and maltose in the form of a liquid or dry malt extract. Maltose and dextrose, in a dry form, are very hydroscopic and exhibit high absorptive and adsorptive characteristics. In contrast to hops, both of these substances have a relatively stable shelf life at room temperature so that they can be stored for substantial periods of time without refrigeration. It is thus desireable to utilize the shelf life and other physical properties of these ingredients to extend the shelf life of hops.